Mac|Life's CES 2011 FTW Award Winners

Most Innovative Product

In a CES jammed with iPhone cases, iPad cases, battery packs, and even more iPhone cases, the device that impressed the most from the world of Mac and iDevice products was Cobra’s iRadar. It combines a radar/laser detector with an iPhone app, which doesn’t sound like much until you understand how they work together. Thanks to a Bluetooth connection, the iRadar uses your phone’s GPS connection to track where you are, taking advantage of Cobra’s database of speed and red-light cameras to give you ample warning over the speaker. But best of all is a new feature coming this spring that will pool the info of all iRadar users, so if your detector picks up a radar gun in use, it instantly notifies all the other users, creating a pretty impressive live database. And that’s definitely innovative product design.

Runner-Up

If you’ve ever sweated bullets setting up and installing a NAS, you’ll understand why Buffalo’s CloudStor impressed us. They don’t want us to call it a NAS, and while it is one, what’s remarkable about it is the painless setup. It comes preconfigured, so all you have to do is plug it in, connect it to your router, and then go to cloudstor.com to create an account that lets you access any files you store on this not-NAS from any web browser. Apps for your iPhone and iPad also let you access your stuff from those devices, and the demo we saw really shined for its impressive ease of use and speedy connection. Here’s hoping it holds up under the testing we’ll put it through when we give it a full review in the next couple months.

Best Content Creation Product

As a pedalboard, the excellent Griffin StompBox serves a relatively small niche of recording guitarists. Even so, the StompBox’s solid build quality and ease of use was unlike anything else we saw at the expo. If you’ve never used a pedalboard, it’s easy: by stepping on one of the StompBox’s four foot switches you change the guitar effects of a real guitar, connected with a fancy included instrument cable. Supported apps like iShred allowed you to set the switch to any number of effects and even record the guitar as you played it --all by simply tapping your toes.

But the beauty of the pedalboard isn’t just in its uses as a guitarist’s tool. Like the iPad at launch, the Griffin StompBox’s uses are only defined by what app developers do with it. Griffin showed us an early beta for an app that allowed you to control a teleprompter with the footswitch. Stepping on any of the switches played, paused, fast-forwarded, rewound, or slowed down the speech on your iPad or iPhone (it worked on both!). In short, we want one.

Runner-Up

Maybe CES just makes us more hungry than usual -- okay, not maybe -- but hey, we just saw a demo of meat sizzling on a grill connected to an iPhone, and if that’s not an important leap forward in content creation, we don’t know what is. The iGrill is a Bluetooth cooking thermometer that connects to an app on your iPhone, giving you vital information like whether your steak is ready to eat. (Now we’re hungry again.) The app can support multiple probes and has other handy kitchen features like a timer and recipe storage.

The hardware alone would be enough to sell the product to many health fanatics, but we got a glimpse of the MyTrek app, and it’s comprehensive and wildly efficient at helping you reach your goals: Want to stay in a specific heart rate zone? No problem, just tell the application where you want to be and it’ll help you get there with all sorts of beeps. It can also harness the iPhone’s built-in GPS to tell you how far you ran (or biked) and how many calories you burned in the process.

Runner-Up

One of the best things about the Mac mini is that it works so well as a TV-connected home-theater Mac. That’s where H-Squared Mini Mount comes in. Designed in conjunction with Apple’s mini team, it replaces your mini's cover with one that lets you mount the mini in your living room (or anywhere) by screwing it right to the wall. It also has a screw pattern for VESA mounting, which means you can just screw your mini onto the back of a VESA-compatible monitor like, say, the Cinema Display. While it features a locking mechanism and doesn’t block any ports or airflow, our favorite little extra is an optional white LED backlight that gives your mounted mini some ground-effects styling. Awesome.

Best iPhone/iPad Accessory

We know you think we’re crazy. When we first looked at Ten One Design’s Fling, we had the same thought -- who needs a junky thumbstick that suction-cups onto an iPad? Then we tried it…and it’s freakin’ awesome. One of the biggest downsides of iPad gaming is the virtual thumbsticks that are common in iOS games, especially shooters. They’re almost always a bit fussy, and they lack the tactile feedback of thumbsticks on a videogame controller. The Fling changes all that. It worked perfectly with the games we tried, and the tactile response significantly improved the gaming experience. The two little suction cups make attaching and removing the Fling a cinch, but since they’re positioned to the side, it’s also pretty to lift the Fling out of the way of an onscreen control you might need without removing it entirely. At $25, any serious iPad gamer needs a pair of these bad boys.

Runner-Up

Even the iPhone 4’s great battery doesn’t last us through our most rigorous days of phone use. On those rare days when we rely on our phones for constant, important tasks, an external battery is a necessity. We at MacLife are divided over how we like to juice our iDevices -- with case chargers versus external batteries -- but we weren’t so divided at CES. The Incipio won our hearts through its crazy-slim profile. It’s no exaggeration to say that it hardly seems larger than a normal non-battery case. Plus, the thing looks dang fine in matte black.

Best Audio Product

Luxury companies rarely chase trends. That’s why we were as surprised as anyone when Bowers & Wilkins announced that its Zeppelin successor would implement a new and proprietary technology (Apple’s AirPlay), and even be named after it. The Zeppelin Air might be unexpected, but it’s far from unwanted.

The Zeppelin Air is a piece of art, similar to its predecessor. A chrome dock allows you to dock any and all of your iPods and iPhones, but the beauty of AirPlay is that you’ll never have to. In fact, you can even stream songs straight from iTunes without ever leaving your couch (thanks, Remote app!). B&W isn’t the first company to implement this technology, but the Zeppelin Air is arguably one of the best -- if not the best -- speaker to use it so far.

Runner-Up

This year at CES, products that acoustically boost your iOS devices' volume were all the rage. We even saw a silicone horn (LINK) that could raise your iPhone’s volume to up to 13 decibels, which, in layman’s terms, is a lot. But our favorite booster is the unassuming AirCurve Play by Griffin, a total redesign from the AirCurve for iPhone 3G/3GS we dug so much at Macworld 2009. Made from clear plastic, the brick-sized AirCurve Play is definitely not for everyone. The thing is a solid piece of plastic, the kind of toy you can rough up without worrying you might break it. And at $20, we suspect very few people will be worried.